Saturn reclaims 'moon king' title from Jupiter with 62 newfound satellites

[Waterluvian]

Dear Astronomers,

You need to stop.

145 moons? This is Pluto levels of disrupting my comprehension of the nearest spec of a spec of a spec of the cosmos. What’s next? Are you going to replace the cosmological constant with a complex series of equations? Are you going to change your minds on the entropic fate of the universe?

You identify that Pluto hasn’t cleared its orbit of asteroids and so you demote it. You know what engineers would do? Engineers would go help Pluto tidy up.

145 moons? Inelegant. It’s time for some refactoring.

Spatially yours,

Me

[bnralt]

> You identify that Pluto hasn’t cleared its orbit of asteroids and so you demote it.

That wasn't really why it was demoted. Eris was discovered, and it was more massive than Pluto, so a decision was to be made about whether we were going to say there were more than nine planets (and admit we don't know exactly how many planets there are in our solar system), or kick out Pluto and just say there are 8. The IAU made a decision about this, not for scientific reasons but for naming conventions (they have a different naming convention for planets and non-planets).

Keep in mind that though some planetary scientists are in the IAU, most members of the IAU aren't planetary scientists, and my understanding is that most planetary scientists aren't members of the IAU (someone correct me if I'm wrong here). But the IAU is responsible for naming things in the night sky.

The initial definition that was suggested didn't include the criteria for clearing the neighborhood, add a bunch of new planets to our solar system, and say we didn't know how many planets there were in our solar system. Members objected, and went with the simpler solution of just kicking Pluto out and saying there are now 8 planets (the definition with the vague "clearing the neighborhood" part of the definition).

I have to say I prefer the original suggestion for the definition of planet; it does a much better job of conveying to people how much cool stuff is in our solar system and how much we still don't know. As far as I can tell planetary scientists aren't fond of the IAU definition and tend to ignore it (though Alan Stern has lead apublic campaign to get rid of IAU's definition).

[rob74]

Hm, maybe they should do something similar as with the planets and include hydrostatic equilibrium into the definition of a "moon". Which would mean that Mars has 0 moons and 2 "minor moons".

[dylan604]

Why do you think they are sending all of the probes? You need a baseline understanding of the materials available before you can really come up with a plan to merge, delete, etc.

[testplzignore]

> That's about two-thirds the length of Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

Is this the unit of measurement space.com readers are most familiar with?

[ajsnigrutin]

Americans will use any unit of measurement, as long as it's not metric!

(yes, yes, shamelessly stolen from: https://old.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/comments/tv9yv6/a_... )

[EamonnMR]

Please give all lengths in Rhode Islands.

[johndunne]

I’d say the article contains the same human generated content as 2 Mcdonald’s Big Macs.

[labster]

Volumes should be given in units of cubic acres.

[bagels]

Pretty absurd. I think they were making a vague 'star' reference. I have no idea how long that is.

[JumpCrisscross]

Might it be a social media hack to encourage sharing?

[birdyrooster]

Is this a rhetorical question?

[samhuk]

> Saturn's system currently hosts three of these groupings — the Inuit group, the Gallic group and the densely populated Norse group, all of which take their names from different mythologies.

> All of the newfound moons of Saturn fall into one of these three currently existing groupings. Three of the new moons belong to the Inuit group, but the majority fit in the Norse group.

TIL Saturn's moons are named after various human groups.

[pavlov]

More precisely the gods and other mythological figures from these peoples.

[goto11]

Named after characters in the mythologies of the groups, e.g. Fenrir from Norse mythology. Initially they were all named after Titans (because Saturn is a Titan), but they ran out of Titans. As far as I can tell, the Norse names are all names of Jötunn which are to some extent a parallel to Titans in Norse mythology.

I like that the moons of Uranus are names after Shakespeare characters.

[ghaff]

I think when I was a kid I could probably have named the canonical list of moons known at the time. I'm pretty sure that would be a very impressive feat today.

[billforsternz]

I would have struggled to match you, but easily doable as I did know Jupiter had 12 moons and Saturn 9 (this was in the 1970s, but the books I was reading were probably old). Having said that, Jupiter had 4 and Saturn 1 'real' mini-planet sized moons then as now. I definitely knew the names of all of those :-)

[tedunangst]

If it's not on the solarquest board game, it's not a real moon or planet. (Although I just found an image of the board reprinted with Makemake, which definitely wasn't there when I played.)

[xwdv]

I always thought it would be cool if multiple habitable planets could exist as moons of some large gas giant and civilizations on these planets could fly around the short distances of their planetary system visiting each other. Alas, it is not possible. Habitable planets can’t seem to really form as satellites for a larger world as explained to me once.

[numbol]

maybe there is hope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_natural_satell...

[maskedinvader]

- Astronomers have discovered 62 new moons orbiting the ringed planet Saturn.

Space must be really really massive, even in our so called cosmic backyard we continue to discover new moons. Incredible.

[walrus01]

On a scale of how far their gravity well extends to suck things up, Saturn and Jupiter are both like the vacuums of the solar system, collecting long period orbit rocks and rubble piles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere

[dehrmann]

Some of these moons are smaller than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

[vlovich123]

What’s the minimum size of a moon? Isn’t every particle within Saturn’s rings technically a “moon”?

[caf]

Nothing orbiting within the Roche limit would be a moon, I would think.

[SapporoChris]

The minimum size isn't defined, but that's okay the maximum size isn't defined either! The orbit has to be identified. So every particle within Saturn's rings doesn't qualify, at least not yet.

[beebeepka]

Based on this article, I'd say about 10 libraries of congress.

[rektide]

And what's the next lowest astronomical category? "Moonlet?" (just made that up AFAIK)

[Aperocky]

The more important part is when do they make the distinction from "moon" to "rocks"

Plenty of larger rocks in Saturn's ring.

[JacobAldridge]

Several years ago I bought myself a post-WWII era copy of Hanmerton’s “Practical Knowledge For All” - the English encyclopaediast had edited together 50 educational courses in a set of 6 books. I love immersing myself in both the content and the historical context of the lessons.

Back then, Jupiter had 11 moons and Saturn had 9 “plus the doubtful Themis” which was discovered by an American astronomer in 1905 but never seen again…

[zuminator]

Saturn of course has no "surface" to speak of, and its atmosphere is opaque, but just imagine what it must be like on a planet with 145 moons and moonlets whirling overhead. Plus those amazing rings.

Not quite the same (and not updated) but here's a simulation of the view from Mimas and Iapetus:

https://youtu.be/GPqa1F0UlnE?t=91

[yieldcrv]

We also could call every rock in its rings a moon

So what?

This is more of an article about the “shift and stack” method than a semantical distinction of zero relevance.

[zeristor]

Are planets grammatically male or female.

I guess taking the lead from being named Roman gods. Earth Venus female, and the rest male.

[smcl]

In English the word "planet" and the planets themselves are gender neutral. "Venus" may have originally been the name of a female god, but the planet itself is it/it:

> Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is a rocky planet with a mass and size narrowly second in the Solar System to Earth

[laputan_machine]

English doesn't sex nouns, so it will probably vary from language to language

[world2vec]

In Portuguese the word 'planet' is grammatically male ("o planeta...").

[progval]

They are all grammatically female in French, even when named after male gods.

[Sparkyte]

Man them Norse folk busy sending up satelites. JK

This is pretty neat. I wonder if we will identify more from Jupiter over the years.

[ars]

And how come we got just one?

We need more moons! Just think of the night views.

[mulmen]

Our moon is enormous relative to our size. It probably gobbled up any other natural satellites.

[eslaught]

Can someone explain to me how we're only discovering these moons in 2023? Do we really not have sensitive enough instruments to see rocks over a mile in diameter in our own solar system?

[gorgoiler]

A lot of these search problems are easier to wrap ones head around with the keys analogy: finding a moon around Saturn, or finding a lost ship on the ocean* is like losing your car keys in a field then trying to find them with a pair of binoculars. If you do actually know where they are then you can easily see them with the binoculars but if you need to perform a search it is laborious because of the relative scales.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Arctic_Sea

[zeroonetwothree]

It’s equivalent to seeing an object one micron in size at a distance of a mile. Or like seeing something one nanometer in size at a distance of 1 meter (for example that’s about the size of a water molecule). And it’s constantly moving.

[hackernewds]

No.